Steven Soderbergh, Political Theorist

Andrew Sullivan thought the right excerpt from this charming interview with retiring film director Steven Soderbergh was his view that Hollywood would run the government better than our current political system does:

I look at Hurricane Katrina, and I think if four days before landfall you gave a movie studio autonomy and a 100th of the billions the government spent on that disaster, and told them, “Lock this place down and get everyone taken care of,” we wouldn’t be using that disaster as an example of what not to do.

Hollywood! The place that brought you Heaven’s Gate and Ishtar! The place where a cartoon director was handed $200 million to direct John Carter, no questions asked, because hey, how different can live action be? The place where studio chiefs practically quiver in fear over green lighting a movie that’s not a comic book or a sequel. The place with executives so easy to parody that it hardly even seems worth the bother anymore. The place that spent years trying to ban VCRs. The place that’s spent the past two decades trying to figure out the internet without any notable success.

How is it that smart people can be so dumb about government? Does Soderbergh seriously think that Hollywood is a poster child for the efficient use of budget dollars? Does he really believe that Hollywood is ideology free? Is he aware, for example, that our copyright law is the shambles it is largely because of Hollywood lobbying? Does he realize that governments deal with problems just a wee more important and less tractable than which green-screen technology works best? Does he have the slightest idea how the real world works? Apparently not.

Look: Soderbergh is actually making an extraordinarily familiar critique. Hollywood, notwithstanding the massive flops that happen every so often, is a hugely successful business. They sell a lot of product, and they make a lot of money – and they do a pretty decent job of spreading that wealth around (thanks to the combination of heavy unionization and the high average skill level of employees). And successful businessmen, who have run large organizations very effectively according to management principles that don’t seem to be applied very effectively in government, almost always think they could run things better than the clowns in Congress.

And they are right! The American government is not designed to run things well – it is designed to prevent civil war or violent revolution by mediating irreconcilable differences between regional and other large interests. Effectiveness is an important secondary consideration. On that score, it has an okay record – better than France since their 1789 revolution, not as good as Britain since their 1688 revolution.

Drum makes fun of Soderbergh for saying that our government would run better if the President had more power for a shorter span of time. But if you drop the notion that the head of government should be a separately-elected President, then Soderbergh is basically uttering poli-sci conventional wisdom: that a Parliamentary system where the government has very broad powers but clear accountability is more effective at making and implementing policy than a system with checks and balances.

We hear this critique all the time. From the right, it is usually phrased as a longing to have government run “as a business” – or by a businessman. From the left, it is usually phrased as a longing to have a more “professional” government – with less interference by ignorant elected officials. Both longings are entirely reasonable: we really could design a more effective government. If we wanted to – if we were sure we would be satisfied being governed by an effective government that would periodically be controlled by our ideological enemies.

What I liked about the interview much more than this fairly conventional complaint about the inefficiency of government is what I like so much about Soderbergh as a figure: that he exercises masterful control while being very unobtrusive. Soderbergh isn’t an “auteur” in the way that, say, Martin Scorsese or Quentin Tarantino or Spike Lee is. You don’t go to a “Soderbergh film” expecting to see his fingerprints all over the thing. Quite the opposite. And yet he’s not a hack in any way – everything he does, successful or not, is distinctive. That’s because he views his job as being a facilitator – he is putting his skills at the service of the work, which requires letting himself see what the work essentially is, so that the work can excite him, rather than imposing himself on it and trying to make it his. And the same goes for how he treats those who work for him, particularly actors. His discussion of how he has approached his work recalled to my mind the discussion Alan Jacobs and I had a while back about self expression versus craft in the creation of art.

That skill at facilitating rather than commanding, and at seeing what the work is rather than setting out to put one’s own stamp on the work, is also vital in political leadership. But that’s not very often what you hear from critics of our government’s effectiveness – whether from the left or right. When we imagine businessmen “fixing” the government, we imagine commanding Randian heroes mercilessly scything through bloat. When we imagine a more professional government, we imagine diligent researchers writing theoretically optimal regulations based on science. We don’t imagine somebody like Soderbergh who, from the evidence of the way he talks about his work and from the body of his work himself, has a keen awareness of how much more effective he is when he starts not with an idea, or with his own desire to “make a difference,” but with the thing itself, as it is, in all its complexity, and puts himself at that thing’s service. That approach is as applicable to reforming the health-care system as it is to making a tent-pole movie.

As for movies, Soderbergh’s probably right that they don’t matter as much as they once did, but as I said before, that’s okay.

9 Responses to Steven Soderbergh, Political Theorist

I think you’re wrong about Kevin’s critique here–and your obvious admiration for Soderbergh’s films and his techniques (on which I agree with you) makes you far more sympathetic to his off-hand remarks about government than they deserve (not that he shouldn’t say them). As you see, Kevin acknowledges immediately that the “more power, less time” paradigm happens in a lot of other countries (aka the parliamentary system of government) but that doesn’t necessarily produce governments that “work”–sometimes all it means is that you have more elections.

The fundamental problem of politics is that really–there’s no definition of what constitutes working: you make it up as you muddle along. You say that the right thing to do is to put yourself at the service of “the thing itself.” And your example of the thing is “reforming the health-care system.” But really–that’s where all the rub is, isn’t it? Reform it for whom? For patients who don’t have insurance? Cut costs so that Medicare doesn’t go bankrupt? And what happens to insurance companies and doctors in the process–and is it any wonder that they fight for what they want to keep? I think that your point that the best approach is to take care of the thing itself is exactly what you criticize the left for (“diligent researchers writing theoretically optimal regulations based on science”)–except that you don’t imagine this as a value-less exercise of science, but rather a technocratic exercise done by the government which knows exactly what it stands for, its values. Well, governments often don’t know exactly whom they stand for–especially in a field where there are far too many conflicting stakeholders. And that’s what politics is.

Now, to be sure, when the thing itself is making a movie, there are multiple stakeholders there as well, and yes, the director’s ability is as much about resolving all the competing stakeholders’ (studios, artists, financiers, focus groups) vision of what a film should be, as it is about the technical craft (frankly, the two can’t be separated). Sometimes that conflict is minimal–everyone involved agrees that what makes the movie works is that it works and recovers as much money as it can. Sometimes the conflict is maximal: everyone has different visions of what the movie should be, and perhaps that’s when a director like Soderbergh is the best (incidentally the auteur theory put a different spin on your point: the best directors were those that put their own imprint on the movie despite all the conflicting visions of other stakeholders).

Be that as it may, while I don’t think Soderbergh was putting a great deal of thought into his off-the-cuff remarks, I think you are interpreting his statements way too broadly. Drum seems to me to have it right.

The argument is sound that a competent director who successfully carries out the diverse responsibilities of managing the thousands of tasks and people in a big budget film would have done that “heck of a job” far better than the erstwhile “Brownie” did during the (continuing) Katrina travesty.

And they are right! The American government is not designed to run things well – it is designed to prevent civil war or violent revolution by mediating irreconcilable differences between regional and other large interests. Effectiveness is an important secondary consideration. On that score, it has an okay record – better than France since their 1789 revolution, not as good as Britain since their 1688 revolution.

Wow. This is really superb — likely the most insightful idea I will read today. Thank you.

Hollywood makes money successfully the same way Las vegas and Wall Street do, they build administrative barriers to entry, creating endogeneous decreasing marginal costs to scale, that is, legal construction of an unregulated oligopoly, sometimes called market power, or market failure. Indeed the harvard Business School strategy Bible of Porter is all about this, using various methods to decrease effective competition and build barriers to entry.

But waht is the product of this monotonous, networked, inter linked oligopoly market failure?

Larry David pissing on a portrait of the Christian savior with his ignorant pleb evangelicals decrying it a miracle of Jesus weeping, all the while the secular cosmopolitans titter uncomfortably .

I’ve spent more than 25 years running film sets, and while I agree that most crews are hardworking and capable professionals, I can provides thousands of examples of production being held up by everything from the cliche of the actor who won’t come to the set, or sleeps in, or wants days off, to equipment breaking down, script issues, etc. I can envision emergency supplies being held up by a studio or network due to product placement issues ( “We can’t deliver them Dasani water, we’ve got a deal with Pepsi!!!”). Even directors can hold up production (“I asked for Pampers, not Huggies. Let’s wait for the right diapers before we do this”) for what he or she sees as a legitimate reason. Of course, we could face a week’s delay or more because budget issues have to be worked out, rewrites are still in the works, the contract hasn’t been signed, etc.

The film business is choked with interlocking and clashing networks of bureaucracies — levels of studio executives (creative, business, legal), agencies with producing interests, multiple producers and investors, unions and guilds, etc.

Yes, our film crews are very efficient and effective once we have the necessary materials and a game plan. But I would say that of most boots to the ground forces — The National Guard, public utility workers, FEMA employees, etc. The failures usually come from the top — poor decision making, egos, apathy, politics, etc. And there’s plenty of that to go around in the film business.